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A Look at Bathrooms

When the architect asked the Nelson family for requests before he set out to rehab their 1870s Victorian in San Francisco, five-year-old Jonathan Nelson’s one wish was for views from the Zuma tub. He got that and then some, and now he and his three-year-old brother Jonas (pictured) refuse to bathe anywhere else. The stand-alone faucet is by Lefroy Brooks from the XO collection. Read the whole story here.

Winged light bulbs, "Birdie" by Ingo Maurer, bring levity to Barbara Hill's bathroom inside a renovated 1960s condominium in Houston. The bathtub, designed to be set into a tile enclosure, was left bare to expose a rough exterior and surrounded by walls of zinc sheeting traditionally used for roofing. The sink, designed to be undermounted, was overmounted to expose its similarly unfinished edge. Read the whole story here.

Byron Mouton of Bild Design combined three distinct interior spaces on one oversized urban lot in New Orleans to create his own home. In the bathroom, unexpected materials, such as a cement board shower surround, were often cheaper and easier to install than more traditional ones. “We made design decisions based on what we knew was easily available,” Mouton recalls. “The trick was to assemble these materials to express qualities that aren’t normally evident.” Read the entire article here.

A onetime horse stable in Chicago underwent a modern renovation by Studio Gang Architects. The master bathroom, with its frosted glass walls and chair (rescued from the trash pile and rehabbed), is large and elegant enough to serve as a gathering place for parties. Read the entire article here.

A skylight over the middle of a room is a nice thing. But, as architect Riley Pratt demonstrates, using a skylight along the edge of a room can help dematerialize walls and make an indoor space feel especially luminous. Here, a shower stall inside a renovated warehouse in Los Angeles seems to continue right up to the clouds (the skylight was installed so that its frame isn’t visible from below). “It’s like showering outside,” says the resident, artist Tad Beck. Read the whole story here.

Brooklyn–based graphic designers Jeanette and Mike Abbink worked with Architecture + Construction to renovate their residence. In the bathroom, the gray Carrara walls are offset by bright tulip-patterned wallpaper, circa 1970, from Secondhand Rose in Tribeca. The toilet is a Philippe Starck “jet action” model from Duravit. Read the entire article here.

Inside an old gameskeeper's cottage in Somerset, England, architect Piers Taylor selected a Tokyo roll-top bathtub from victoriaplumb for the master bathroom. The floor-to-ceiling window frames an epic view of the house's somewhat isolated setting. Read the whole story here.

In the master bathroom, Samaha and Hart installed a carrera marble countertop, Vero sink and Stark 3 toilet by Duravit, and On the Rocks wall sconces by Flos. Grist and Goldberg longed for Bisazza tiles but cringed at their cost; in the end, they were able to find discontinued colors online for a steal of a price.Photo by Sharon RisedorphPhoto by Sharon Risedorph.

Inside a San Diego residence created by architects Jim Brown and James Gates,the blue-tiled master bathroom stands in contrast to the muted tones of the rest of the house. The tile is recycled glass from China. Read the entire article here.

Rather than concealing the 1800s beams that frame a renovated barn in upstate New York, architect Preston Scott Cohen integrated them to create a dialogue between modern and historic elements in the master bathroom. Read the whole story here.

For the bathroom inside Blake Dollahite's formerly rundown Austin bungalow, he repurposed a beat-up white credenza that he’d had in storage for years by fitting it with a robin’s-egg-blue sink from a Habitat for Humanity ReStore. With an aged mirror and small light fixtures, the compact space resembles a country doctor’s office. Read the whole story here.

For their newly constructed home in Queenstown, on New Zealand's South Island, architects Bronwen Kerr and Pete Ritchie devised a ladder to lead up to a yoga studio from the master bathroom. “We wanted it to be a young person’s house, sort of like a primary school,” Kerr says. Read the whole story here.

Architects Andy Bernheimer and Jared Della Valle, of Brooklyn’s Della Valle Bernheimer, came up with creative solutions to help David Carmel, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a driving accident, move around comfortably in his wheelchair throughout his Chelsea apartment. The bathroom has a roll-in shower and a sliding door made of Lumasite, a translucent acrylic that resembles rice paper. The architects bolted the Lumasite to an aluminum frame, but it can also be glued to wood, for a shoji screenlike effect. For extra stiffness, the architects glued two sheets of Lumasite together. Finding the right glue required a lot of trial and error, Della Valle recalls—which may explain why the manufacturer now sells double-thick sheets. Read the whole story here.

After a gut renovation, a onetime gunpowder store became architect Brian Zulaikha's residence in Balmain Point, Australia. In the upstairs bathroom, the sun cuts down through skylights, casting rhythmic shadows of roof beams onto the floor and walls. The bathroom includes a cantilevered toilet by Catalano. Read the whole story here.

Architect Matthew Trzebiatowski's bathroom retains the spirit of intense Arizona heat with its shocking magenta ceilings, floors, and walls. The vanity is anything but—opting for art instead of a mounted mirror—and is made from sanded and sealed oriented strand board (OSB), a material typically used in sheathing. Read the whole story here.

In Australia's Northern Territory, architect Sue Harper conceived a prefab structure comprised of three pavilions joined by suspended walkways. For the master bathroom, she clad the walls in steel. Harper and her husband, Andy Irvine, used BlueScope’s Zincalume Mini Orb steel sheeting that has fine corrugations. It is usually employed as external cladding, so it is durable and highly resistant to moisture. Read the whole story here.

A Jutland, Denmark, house designed by Mette Nygaard and Morten Schmidt of the architecture firm Schmidt, Hammer & Lassen features a minimalist bathroom that's naturally lit with Plexiglass skylights. Read the whole story here.

Because a renovated 85-year-old shophouse in Singapore, redesigned by architect Yong Ter, architectural consultants Teng Wui and Andrew Lee, and project manager Edwin Foo, is so narrow and long (16 by 68 feet), the design team decided to create a huge open-air space to light the interior naturally. Two retractable motor-driven canvas canopies shelter the space during Singapore’s frequent rains. Read the whole story here.

Londoner Dave Clayden claims that Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was the inspiration for the bathroom inside his Brisbane, Australia, house. The bathroom enhances the room’s acoustics—"reducing any tendency for echoing," notes Clayden. Read the whole story here.

For his home in Accra, Ghana, architect Joe Osae-Addo was determined to build with the materials found primarily in rural areas: timber and adobe mud blocks. In the master bathroom, a six-by-six-foot shower boasts a hardwood-slatted deck, which allows water to seep into a concrete pan that empties into the main drainage system. The cage of bamboo poles provides the requisite privacy to the bather. Read the whole story here.